Yeah this isn't an unprecedented move. If I recall, more than one MMO has done this exact same thing. It is nice of them, I agree... but really, having played their game, there's no way they could fix it enough for me to find it interesting. This is a game that will require multiple expansion packs before I consider it again - maybe in a year or two I will look back and see how it is going.
My account starter October 6th, which means in my case they have until Decmember 6 to show some good progress on the things they're promising. That's roughly 51 days, almost 2 months. Quite a bit can be done in 2 months by a focused dev team. Whether or not SE has that focus we shall see. But I'm willing to let them try after this announcement.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.- -And on the 8th day, man created God.-
CSR: "I'm sorry to hear that, how about we give you an extra 30 days game time to make up for it?"
Customer: "Uh...so I get 30 more days to play your s***ty game that I don't enjoy playing?"
....releasing a game in this state and then awarding people 30 more days to continue to play it in that state is stupid IMO. It's simply doing something positive in order to divert attention from their collossal f*** up. And as the above scenario indicates: if you didn't enjoy the game in the first place, why would you want an extra 30 days of play time? Screw that buy me a month in an MMO I actually enjoy and that might make up for my wasted time in your title. (Obviously they would never do that, I'm just saying...)
You mean like when Blizzard gave players a lot more than 30 days of free time, much of it one day at a time, in the beginning while they sorted their shit out?
Where the hell did that come from?
How you guys name drop Blizzard out of the blue like that is mind boggling...
Its like a Pokemon secret weapon.
"Blizzard I choose you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
its like the secret weapon in every argument lol.
Because it's the most popular example of a dev company that did the same thing SE is doing ( giving free time ) to keep their customers while they got everything working.
Originally posted by Nephaerius
Originally posted by eyeswideopen It's the same in my book. I don't care if you are SE, Blizzard, or whoever. But to be totally honest WoW had more to offer at launch than FFXIV does (including jumping j/k . I mean seriously, even if they fixed every technical problem in the game atm there is still next to no content at all. Story missions 5-10 levels a part and the leve system is the epitome of "Go kill X of Y." Ouside of that all there is grinding levels and crafts. If the game were fully fleshed out it could be awesome (the combat itself when you get into the intricacies of it - enemy actions, positional attacking, class combos, etc. is interesting), but that's still a year or more away IMO. ATM they don't even have most of the standard features of an MMO at launch.
I agree. But since I'm not having to pay to play for almost 2 more months, i think I can afford to give them the same benefit of the doubt given to Blizzard at their launch. I'm sure they've at least got some new content that's been working in the background, now they've got almost 2 months to complete it and get it out, along with the other fixes which should be easier to do and be out faster.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.- -And on the 8th day, man created God.-
CSR: "I'm sorry to hear that, how about we give you an extra 30 days game time to make up for it?"
Customer: "Uh...so I get 30 more days to play your s***ty game that I don't enjoy playing?"
....releasing a game in this state and then awarding people 30 more days to continue to play it in that state is stupid IMO. It's simply doing something positive in order to divert attention from their collossal f*** up. And as the above scenario indicates: if you didn't enjoy the game in the first place, why would you want an extra 30 days of play time? Screw that buy me a month in an MMO I actually enjoy and that might make up for my wasted time in your title. (Obviously they would never do that, I'm just saying...)
You mean like when Blizzard gave players a lot more than 30 days of free time, much of it one day at a time, in the beginning while they sorted their shit out?
Where the hell did that come from?
How you guys name drop Blizzard out of the blue like that is mind boggling...
Its like a Pokemon secret weapon.
"Blizzard I choose you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
its like the secret weapon in every argument lol.
Because it's the most popular example of a dev company that did the same thing SE is doing ( giving free time ) to keep their customers while they got everything working.
LOL! No need to respond to me i was only being funny (or attempting too)..,.
Because it's the most popular example of a dev company that did the same thing SE is doing ( giving free time ) to keep their customers while they got everything working.
LOL! No need to respond to me i was only being funny (or attempting too)..,.
Heheh, it was kind of funny.
I think Pika-chu would kick Blizz's ass though.
Followed by a forum flaiming by Charizard.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.- -And on the 8th day, man created God.-
This is a message everyone can read on their account page. A free extra month will be added to the 30 days you got with the game. Clearly regonizing that people are NOT satisfied and that to many will quit if expected to pay.
Not bad. Funcom could have done this with AoC, but didn't. I doubt they will be able to "fix" the game itself, since I think there are several core things not so much broken as badly designed. But for those who like the game but have bugs, they can try the game for another month.
At least this shows SE is taking the critism to heart and not just sitting back with their fingers in their ears. Good for them.
Have they done the other smart thing and added a download to their official site to go along with the buddy keys or have they not figured that one out yet?
Yeah man, why would anyone ever compare this game to WoW? It's not like WoW is also a fantasy-themed MMO for the same system, with the same genre and play-style, competing for the same market. /sarcasm.
Because it's the most popular example of a dev company that did the same thing SE is doing ( giving free time ) to keep their customers while they got everything working.
LOL! No need to respond to me i was only being funny (or attempting too)..,.
Heheh, it was kind of funny.
I think Pika-chu would kick Blizz's ass though.
Followed by a forum flaiming by Charizard.
Heh it is a valid point though not quite the same.Blizz does not charge you for days when the servers are down past what is deemed a reasonable amount of time or during peak times it is one of the things Blizz does right and plenty of their competitors don't.Well that was the case when i was playing which was admittedly a few years back now.
No. In the business of profit making, when customers submit polite, well reasoned reports of problems you tell them "Thank you, we will work hard to solve these problems."
You do not give away free month of service (millions of dollars) out of the goodness of your soul. You do give away millions when your customers are crying bloody hell and are beating your door for their money back.
Think about it, and deep down you will agree. As a manager, you are not going to cut yourself and admit you made a huge mistake because of some polite bug reports. And we are talking about SE here.
Actually, I am a manager. A damn good one. And a damn good manager will admit when they made a mistake, and do everything they deem reasonable in order to satisfy their customer.
"YOU" do not speak for everyone. What "YOU" deem reasonable will be different from what the next person deems reasonable. And the person in charge of this particular endeavor said "We screwed up, let's try to make it up to them in an immediate, tangible way, while we fix the things that are not so immediately fixable."
This a great step by SE, one that I thought we'de never see.
Give them credit for it. They could have appraoched the situation a million different ways. They came out and said, "The game is lacking, here's what we're doing in the next two months, and here's a free month of game time up and until the first patch in november rolls around."
APPLAUD a company for doing this. Don't be so petty as to say that the $40-75 you spent was a "rip off." How's that any different than going to see a movie, paying $25-30 bucks for tickets and popcorn/candy/drink, walking out of the movie and saying "This movie sucked ass, give me my money back."
It doesn't work that way. What SE is doing is like a movie company giving you a free ticket to their next movie because the movie you just saw sucked. It doesn't happen, but SE did it.
Either thank them for their willingness or move on. It's only the mature thing to do.
As for me, this is GREAT news. CAn't wait to go back and play some more tonight. The future is looking brighter and brighter.
Good news for the FF subscribers, but Age of Conan was in the same boat when it first came out and even though they drastically improved the game the population never recovered.
Freaking best move I've seen a MMO developer do in a long time, probably ever. They seriously need some major applause for thise.
You just fell for the human pychological phenomenon of gaps. They were so bad, and now they do something they absolutely had to do to stay afloat anyway, and bam, instant goodwill. Bank it.
Originally posted by Werecool01
*snip*
No. In the business of profit making, when customers submit polite, well reasoned reports of problems you tell them "Thank you, we will work hard to solve these problems."
You do not give away free month of service (millions of dollars) out of the goodness of your soul. You do give away millions when your customers are crying bloody hell and are beating your door for their money back.
Think about it, and deep down you will agree. As a manager, you are not going to cut yourself and admit you made a huge mistake because of some polite bug reports. And we are talking about SE here.
To add on to this.
They are not doing this to make amends to PC Players. They are doing it to shut them up or at least mitigate the flood of bad word of mouth so that it does not hurt their main target: the console audience.
The millions in subs lost is just marketing for the PS3 version.
Good news for the FF subscribers, but Age of Conan was in the same boat when it first came out and even though they drastically improved the game the population never recovered.
Yep. Then again, FF has some of the more rabid fans in the video gaming world. SE could literally ride on the name.
This is exactly what SE should've done from the start. Instead of releasing the game prematurely, it should've just been delayed another month. First impressions do matter, and SE has already lost a number of potential subscribers. But we'll see how it goes. May have gotten another 30days, but it's just not fun to log into repeating guildleves and beating on some marmots....again =/
Freaking best move I've seen a MMO developer do in a long time, probably ever. They seriously need some major applause for thise.
LOL You are so wrong. The game should have been delayed instead of being released and now you want to praise them for barely giving what people deserve, and 30 days isnt going to cut it. Douche
They are not doing this to make amends to PC Players. They are doing it to shut them up or at least mitigate the flood of bad word of mouth so that it does not hurt their main target: the console audience.
The millions in subs lost is just marketing for the PS3 version.
What is the best way to shut them up? My answer, offer them services for free and promise changes they are asking for. If they fail to do that, that's on SE as it will change nothing for them, aside from making things worse.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
This a great step by SE, one that I thought we'de never see.
Give them credit for it. They could have appraoched the situation a million different ways. They came out and said, "The game is lacking, here's what we're doing in the next two months, and here's a free month of game time up and until the first patch in november rolls around."
APPLAUD a company for doing this. Don't be so petty as to say that the $40-75 you spent was a "rip off." How's that any different than going to see a movie, paying $25-30 bucks for tickets and popcorn/candy/drink, walking out of the movie and saying "This movie sucked ass, give me my money back."
It doesn't work that way. What SE is doing is like a movie company giving you a free ticket to their next movie because the movie you just saw sucked. It doesn't happen, but SE did it.
Either thank them for their willingness or move on. It's only the mature thing to do.
As for me, this is GREAT news. CAn't wait to go back and play some more tonight. The future is looking brighter and brighter.
^^ This.
How some of you can spin this into being a bad thing is completely ludicrous. If you don't like the game then you should be happy to see that they have acknowledged it's faults and are working on fixing them. The fact that they are willing to give you 30 more days for free just to stick around says to me that they really plan on making a lot of improvements in a short period of time.
This a great step by SE, one that I thought we'de never see.
Give them credit for it. They could have appraoched the situation a million different ways. They came out and said, "The game is lacking, here's what we're doing in the next two months, and here's a free month of game time up and until the first patch in november rolls around."
APPLAUD a company for doing this. Don't be so petty as to say that the $40-75 you spent was a "rip off." How's that any different than going to see a movie, paying $25-30 bucks for tickets and popcorn/candy/drink, walking out of the movie and saying "This movie sucked ass, give me my money back."
It doesn't work that way. What SE is doing is like a movie company giving you a free ticket to their next movie because the movie you just saw sucked. It doesn't happen, but SE did it.
Either thank them for their willingness or move on. It's only the mature thing to do.
As for me, this is GREAT news. CAn't wait to go back and play some more tonight. The future is looking brighter and brighter.
No I will not applaud a company when the REASON its in poor sahpe is because of incompetence.
When Blizzard gave people free play time its because their servers were overloaded. That was not incompetence that was unforseen circumstance. They admitted they did not account for that and then like a good a manager someone somewhere decided not to punish the customer for that mistake and instead take it the hit themselves.
FFXIV and a number of other games are releasing products that are not in a release state. Both technically and in game design. This is half-ass and if it placates you there is something wrong.
See most people, other than warlocks and people getting perma-feared, like plauying WoW in the first month, they simply had trouble actually playing.
Many people in FFXIV and other recent releases are saying they don't want to Beta test a frigging Alpha test release candidate. There are more things than I can count on my fingers of both hands that should have been addressed or had more thought put into. Not all this stuff is bugs its just poor quality not thought out crap, like some of the crafting nodes/searching and interactions.
That type of things should have been exposed in Alpha testing. It should have been thought and re-thought and then thought again jsut to make sure way before that. It wasn't.
I see this over and over for each game. There is more than one reason for issues at a bad release. Some are excusable if the company alleviates the burden form the customer. But some are just not excusable. Incompetence and unprofessionalism is not excusable.
I don't see this helping at all, it simply reinforces the view that the game is currenty rubbish - after all, if the developer says it isn't worth paying for who can possibly disagree?
Fact is, only those who are really enjoying the game will continue past the initial free month and they'd do that anyway regardless of whether they had to pay or not. Those who don't share their enthusiasm for the game don't need another free month in which to make up their mind, they've already quit. Making it free for another month is hardly going to bring them back.
The time to offer an extra free month is when they've fixed the game and want to entice people into having a second look at it. A free "welcome back" month would make sense then, but not before.
This is a very smart move on SE's behalf and I am happy to see them acknowledge the grief. I do think FF will be a great game but it has a few curves to get past, and the major one being the UI/combat UI. Honestly, I can see past EVERYTHING if it wasn't for that.
Honestly, I really wanna hear SE comment on if they are working to revamp the UI, or if they are holding their ground. That's the game breaker for me and I am sure a millon others. However, I am still playing extremely casually. Doing my best to enjoy my Botanist/Weaver/Thaumaturge until the free time is up. Sometimes its just too hard to stay logged in.
I think Bliz is the only other company that offered free time due to server downtime in the past. I could be wrong though. They only credited people days though, not a whole month.
The time to offer an extra free month is when they've fixed the game and want to entice people into having a second look at it. A free "welcome back" month would make sense then, but not before.
By then those customers are playing something else, so it won't matter how good the game is then.
"Welcome back" trials are for the most part useless, I get them pretty regularly from SWG, EQ2, AoC, etc., etc. At most, I login for the free time, dabble a bit, then leave. And I'm fairly certain that how the majority of players respond to "welcome back" trials, otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them offered.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.- -And on the 8th day, man created God.-
They are not doing this to make amends to PC Players. They are doing it to shut them up or at least mitigate the flood of bad word of mouth so that it does not hurt their main target: the console audience.
The millions in subs lost is just marketing for the PS3 version.
What is the best way to shut them up? My answer, offer them services for free and promise changes they are asking for. If they fail to do that, that's on SE as it will change nothing for them, aside from making things worse.
Yes of course its the best way.
Offer people what they want and make them believe they have some advantage over you. Its the classic con job. Of course SE is opting not to make money here, they could charge people. But of course that is also part of the classic con job. Part of making you think they are the one taking a risk or losing something not you.
But that is what you are faced with.
Either this is a con job whose goal is to get money by milking consoles with the FF name.
-OR-
You have a team of developers and designers who will deploy a miracle patch or two in a VERY short time span in the next 2-4 months. Yet that team was so backasswards and/or unperceptive that they either could not notice or did not care about the host of design and technical.
Not only did they either ignore or completely lack the ability to expose all the problems. If they did ignore them then they are either run by suits who will destroy the game or they are so unprofessional that they would sell you a car with two wheels and think its fine.
As a professional software developer, I don't trust any other developer who doesn't test their stuff everytime they make even one signficant change. In fact there are entire server applications for keeping track of a reconciliing these tested changes that good software shops should use for version control and collaborative work.
Why would i believe these guys can make these many changes and do so with quality work when they couldn't or wouldn't do it before? Because they are desparate? Desparation does not help you test better or give you more itegrity. It just makes you work longer hours, which makes you even more error prone.
They half-assed this release and even some of the development. Its obvious to me. As a long time RPG player and professional coder it just shouts out at me and I shake my head. It makes me sad. Hard to say what the soruce they may have good coders who were aware of the problems and bad managers who would not listen that they needed to be fixed or vice versa. Either way all the little things they add up to a very obvious picture. This is not a case of getting busy and missing something. They chose to half ass it. They either chose to release early and were aware of the issues or simply did not take it serious enough to give it thought.
Good luck with the mircale patch(s). You will need it.
Offer people what they want and make them believe they have some advantage over you. Its the classic con job. Of course SE is opting not to make money here, they could charge people. But of course that is also part of the classic con job. Part of making you think they are the one taking a risk or losing something not you.
But that is what you are faced with.
Either this is a con job whose goal is to get money by milking consoles with the FF name.
-OR-
You have a team of developers and designers who will deploy a miracle patch or two in a VERY short time span in the next 2-4 months. Yet that team was so backasswards and/or unperceptive that they either could not notice or did not care about the host of design and technical.
Not only did they either ignore or completely lack the ability to expose all the problems. If they did ignore them then they are either run by suits who will destroy the game or they are so unprofessional that they would sell you a car with two wheels and think its fine.
As a professional software developer, I don't trust any other developer who doesn't test their stuff everytime they make even one signficant change. In fact there are entire server applications for keeping track of a reconciliing these tested changes that good software shops should use for version control and collaborative work.
Why would i believe these guys can make these many changes and do so with quality work when they couldn't or wouldn't do it before? Because they are desparate? Desparation does not help you test better or give you more itegrity. It just makes you work longer hours, which makes you even more error prone.
They half-assed this release and even some of the development. Its obvious to me. As a long time RPG player and professional coder it just shouts out at me and I shake my head. It makes me sad. Hard to say what the soruce they may have good coders who were aware of the problems and bad managers who would not listen that they needed to be fixed or vice versa. Either way all the little things they add up to a very obvious picture. This is not a case of getting busy and missing something. They chose to half ass it. They either chose to release early and were aware of the issues or simply did not take it serious enough to give it thought.
Good luck with the mircale patch(s). You will need it.
Hey, you can believe what you want. Also I don't need good luck, as I opted to wait for the ps3 version of this game after beta feedback. Still I see this as more a positive than a negative. Those who are on the fence get to stick around longer free of charge, as well as get to see the changes for themselves, negating a need to trust or not what they read about them.
Even those who gave up already, can come back if they qualify for this offer, when changes are made and see them for free. There's no con job as far as I can see, as the only risk is on SE with this decision. As they're also allowing any detractor the opportunity to prove they haven't done what they said they will. Win, wIn for the players, at least as far as I'm concerned.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The only time a game company will give 30 days free and slash the price of the box less then 2 weeks after launch is when they enter a panic mode.
Not even Cryptic did that with STO.
Square-Enix is clearly panicking and they only have themselves to blame.
It's not gonna change much though, MMO history teach us that no MMO ever recovers from a bad launch, these washed out developers should have known this by now...
Actually, they probably did but went for a money-grab-western-style anyway, sell boxes on hype, deal with ruined rep and game later...sad.
I care about your gaming 'problems' and teenage anxieties, just not today.
Comments
Yeah this isn't an unprecedented move. If I recall, more than one MMO has done this exact same thing. It is nice of them, I agree... but really, having played their game, there's no way they could fix it enough for me to find it interesting. This is a game that will require multiple expansion packs before I consider it again - maybe in a year or two I will look back and see how it is going.
My account starter October 6th, which means in my case they have until Decmember 6 to show some good progress on the things they're promising. That's roughly 51 days, almost 2 months. Quite a bit can be done in 2 months by a focused dev team. Whether or not SE has that focus we shall see. But I'm willing to let them try after this announcement.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Because it's the most popular example of a dev company that did the same thing SE is doing ( giving free time ) to keep their customers while they got everything working.
I agree. But since I'm not having to pay to play for almost 2 more months, i think I can afford to give them the same benefit of the doubt given to Blizzard at their launch. I'm sure they've at least got some new content that's been working in the background, now they've got almost 2 months to complete it and get it out, along with the other fixes which should be easier to do and be out faster.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
LOL! No need to respond to me i was only being funny (or attempting too)..,.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Heheh, it was kind of funny.
I think Pika-chu would kick Blizz's ass though.
Followed by a forum flaiming by Charizard.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Have they done the other smart thing and added a download to their official site to go along with the buddy keys or have they not figured that one out yet?
Yeah man, why would anyone ever compare this game to WoW? It's not like WoW is also a fantasy-themed MMO for the same system, with the same genre and play-style, competing for the same market. /sarcasm.
Heh it is a valid point though not quite the same.Blizz does not charge you for days when the servers are down past what is deemed a reasonable amount of time or during peak times it is one of the things Blizz does right and plenty of their competitors don't.Well that was the case when i was playing which was admittedly a few years back now.
Actually, I am a manager. A damn good one. And a damn good manager will admit when they made a mistake, and do everything they deem reasonable in order to satisfy their customer.
"YOU" do not speak for everyone. What "YOU" deem reasonable will be different from what the next person deems reasonable. And the person in charge of this particular endeavor said "We screwed up, let's try to make it up to them in an immediate, tangible way, while we fix the things that are not so immediately fixable."
I agree there is something not quite right here. I think you misrepresent the situation a bit.
This a great step by SE, one that I thought we'de never see.
Give them credit for it. They could have appraoched the situation a million different ways. They came out and said, "The game is lacking, here's what we're doing in the next two months, and here's a free month of game time up and until the first patch in november rolls around."
APPLAUD a company for doing this. Don't be so petty as to say that the $40-75 you spent was a "rip off." How's that any different than going to see a movie, paying $25-30 bucks for tickets and popcorn/candy/drink, walking out of the movie and saying "This movie sucked ass, give me my money back."
It doesn't work that way. What SE is doing is like a movie company giving you a free ticket to their next movie because the movie you just saw sucked. It doesn't happen, but SE did it.
Either thank them for their willingness or move on. It's only the mature thing to do.
As for me, this is GREAT news. CAn't wait to go back and play some more tonight. The future is looking brighter and brighter.
Good news for the FF subscribers, but Age of Conan was in the same boat when it first came out and even though they drastically improved the game the population never recovered.
To add on to this.
They are not doing this to make amends to PC Players. They are doing it to shut them up or at least mitigate the flood of bad word of mouth so that it does not hurt their main target: the console audience.
The millions in subs lost is just marketing for the PS3 version.
Yep. Then again, FF has some of the more rabid fans in the video gaming world. SE could literally ride on the name.
This is exactly what SE should've done from the start. Instead of releasing the game prematurely, it should've just been delayed another month. First impressions do matter, and SE has already lost a number of potential subscribers. But we'll see how it goes. May have gotten another 30days, but it's just not fun to log into repeating guildleves and beating on some marmots....again =/
LOL You are so wrong. The game should have been delayed instead of being released and now you want to praise them for barely giving what people deserve, and 30 days isnt going to cut it. Douche
Gamer-4-Life
What is the best way to shut them up? My answer, offer them services for free and promise changes they are asking for. If they fail to do that, that's on SE as it will change nothing for them, aside from making things worse.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
^^ This.
How some of you can spin this into being a bad thing is completely ludicrous. If you don't like the game then you should be happy to see that they have acknowledged it's faults and are working on fixing them. The fact that they are willing to give you 30 more days for free just to stick around says to me that they really plan on making a lot of improvements in a short period of time.
No I will not applaud a company when the REASON its in poor sahpe is because of incompetence.
When Blizzard gave people free play time its because their servers were overloaded. That was not incompetence that was unforseen circumstance. They admitted they did not account for that and then like a good a manager someone somewhere decided not to punish the customer for that mistake and instead take it the hit themselves.
FFXIV and a number of other games are releasing products that are not in a release state. Both technically and in game design. This is half-ass and if it placates you there is something wrong.
See most people, other than warlocks and people getting perma-feared, like plauying WoW in the first month, they simply had trouble actually playing.
Many people in FFXIV and other recent releases are saying they don't want to Beta test a frigging Alpha test release candidate. There are more things than I can count on my fingers of both hands that should have been addressed or had more thought put into. Not all this stuff is bugs its just poor quality not thought out crap, like some of the crafting nodes/searching and interactions.
That type of things should have been exposed in Alpha testing. It should have been thought and re-thought and then thought again jsut to make sure way before that. It wasn't.
I see this over and over for each game. There is more than one reason for issues at a bad release. Some are excusable if the company alleviates the burden form the customer. But some are just not excusable. Incompetence and unprofessionalism is not excusable.
I don't see this helping at all, it simply reinforces the view that the game is currenty rubbish - after all, if the developer says it isn't worth paying for who can possibly disagree?
Fact is, only those who are really enjoying the game will continue past the initial free month and they'd do that anyway regardless of whether they had to pay or not. Those who don't share their enthusiasm for the game don't need another free month in which to make up their mind, they've already quit. Making it free for another month is hardly going to bring them back.
The time to offer an extra free month is when they've fixed the game and want to entice people into having a second look at it. A free "welcome back" month would make sense then, but not before.
This is a very smart move on SE's behalf and I am happy to see them acknowledge the grief. I do think FF will be a great game but it has a few curves to get past, and the major one being the UI/combat UI. Honestly, I can see past EVERYTHING if it wasn't for that.
Honestly, I really wanna hear SE comment on if they are working to revamp the UI, or if they are holding their ground. That's the game breaker for me and I am sure a millon others. However, I am still playing extremely casually. Doing my best to enjoy my Botanist/Weaver/Thaumaturge until the free time is up. Sometimes its just too hard to stay logged in.
I think Bliz is the only other company that offered free time due to server downtime in the past. I could be wrong though. They only credited people days though, not a whole month.
By then those customers are playing something else, so it won't matter how good the game is then.
"Welcome back" trials are for the most part useless, I get them pretty regularly from SWG, EQ2, AoC, etc., etc. At most, I login for the free time, dabble a bit, then leave. And I'm fairly certain that how the majority of players respond to "welcome back" trials, otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them offered.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Yes of course its the best way.
Offer people what they want and make them believe they have some advantage over you. Its the classic con job. Of course SE is opting not to make money here, they could charge people. But of course that is also part of the classic con job. Part of making you think they are the one taking a risk or losing something not you.
But that is what you are faced with.
Either this is a con job whose goal is to get money by milking consoles with the FF name.
-OR-
You have a team of developers and designers who will deploy a miracle patch or two in a VERY short time span in the next 2-4 months. Yet that team was so backasswards and/or unperceptive that they either could not notice or did not care about the host of design and technical.
Not only did they either ignore or completely lack the ability to expose all the problems. If they did ignore them then they are either run by suits who will destroy the game or they are so unprofessional that they would sell you a car with two wheels and think its fine.
As a professional software developer, I don't trust any other developer who doesn't test their stuff everytime they make even one signficant change. In fact there are entire server applications for keeping track of a reconciliing these tested changes that good software shops should use for version control and collaborative work.
Why would i believe these guys can make these many changes and do so with quality work when they couldn't or wouldn't do it before? Because they are desparate? Desparation does not help you test better or give you more itegrity. It just makes you work longer hours, which makes you even more error prone.
They half-assed this release and even some of the development. Its obvious to me. As a long time RPG player and professional coder it just shouts out at me and I shake my head. It makes me sad. Hard to say what the soruce they may have good coders who were aware of the problems and bad managers who would not listen that they needed to be fixed or vice versa. Either way all the little things they add up to a very obvious picture. This is not a case of getting busy and missing something. They chose to half ass it. They either chose to release early and were aware of the issues or simply did not take it serious enough to give it thought.
Good luck with the mircale patch(s). You will need it.
Hey, you can believe what you want. Also I don't need good luck, as I opted to wait for the ps3 version of this game after beta feedback. Still I see this as more a positive than a negative. Those who are on the fence get to stick around longer free of charge, as well as get to see the changes for themselves, negating a need to trust or not what they read about them.
Even those who gave up already, can come back if they qualify for this offer, when changes are made and see them for free. There's no con job as far as I can see, as the only risk is on SE with this decision. As they're also allowing any detractor the opportunity to prove they haven't done what they said they will. Win, wIn for the players, at least as far as I'm concerned.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The only time a game company will give 30 days free and slash the price of the box less then 2 weeks after launch is when they enter a panic mode.
Not even Cryptic did that with STO.
Square-Enix is clearly panicking and they only have themselves to blame.
It's not gonna change much though, MMO history teach us that no MMO ever recovers from a bad launch, these washed out developers should have known this by now...
Actually, they probably did but went for a money-grab-western-style anyway, sell boxes on hype, deal with ruined rep and game later...sad.
I care about your gaming 'problems' and teenage anxieties, just not today.
They cant do anything else anyway.
If they dont do this they risk of a big fail.Which means a lot of money loss.
Whould you like to work on sth and not get paid.
So if these guys want to get paid they have to just surrender and do some clever moves to keep the people.